DECEMBER 10, SUNDAY

STORIES: CHURCH, MYTH, THE GODS

I’m going to puzzle through, for myself, an issue that has long disturbed me. This is my answer for myself, for today anyway. If you have wondered about the same thing you’ll have to puzzle it out for yourself.

On Sunday I went to church. The Warren Wilson Presbyterian Church is a beautiful church largely built by the students in the 1960‘s. There were two hundred fifty students in the 60s when Warren Wilson was a two year college. All of the students and the faculty were expected to attend church on Sunday morning and the church was full. I don‘t know when student attendance became optional but through the ‘90s, long after church attendance was no longer required the church seemed full with a number of students and local people. But over the years most of the hair has become white and fewer students have attended and then with Covid quarantines and a shift to showing the service on You Tube the church had only teleservices. Then with the lifting of the Covid anxiety, with regular services again the number of people dwindled again. Now there are only 40 or 50 attendees. Maybe some people are still watching via You Tube, but the church seems empty. If packed together we would only fill three rows.

The services are still lively, the preaching is still thoughtful and moving, the choir still sings and the organist plays beautifully. It isn’t the quality of the services that keeps people away. It is a cultural change, I think. It is not just Warren Wilson Presbyterian church, attendance is down everywhere. The Swannanoa Presbyterian church closed down. People are simply not going to church, particularly young people.

I’ve read that it is partly this loss of membership that is causing the evangelical churches to feel threatened and to be more and more extreme. They feel challenged by loss of membership with this feeling of being hollowed out being one of the things that they blame on liberals for undermining religion with secularism. I don’t know if that is true or not. It could be that preaching fear and the need to strike back at their perceived enemies fires up evangelicals and helps slow this loss of membership. I don’t know if that is true, either.

When I was a missionary child growing up in India, attending a missionary school, I was expected to go to church every Sunday. I don’t remember resenting this. I rather enjoyed going to church.

In my own life I think several things made church less attractive. One was the discovery that the word Christian became linked to racial segregation. In the South, where I live, Christian Schools were set up to continue the pattern of segregation after segregation itself was against the law. But I don’t think that is necessarily the case now with the Christian Schools that are thriving. But lately the term Christian is often linked to Christian nationalism, to male supremacy, to Christian fundamentalism, to Republican policies of grievance and resentment. Instead of love your neighbor, the message seems to be, hate your enemy. And this attitude repels many young people.

A second thing, which may be more a look at myself than anyone else, is that the Warren Wilson Presbyterian Church began to seem to me to be more and more like a social club that tithed. You paid your dues in the form of pledges and offerings and most of the money went to the upkeep of the church, the salaries of the staff, and the social activities of the church with only 10% going to the poor or the disadvantaged. It seemed it was a social club for well to do middle class comfortable Americans and the galling thing for me was that this life style I resented was my own. But this is ignoring all of the valuable volunteer work of so many members (but not me).

But a third thing was probably the most powerful reason that the church was losing its hold on me. And that is because in a universe which started with a big bang 13 billion years ago and evolved in many ways, including the evolution of life on earth through occasional mutations over a long period of time which resulted in life on earth as we know it was what I firmly believed. Stories of creation in the Bible seemed to contradict this. Science seemed to leave no place for God, any god. The basis for Christianity, the basis for all religions, was mythological which was treated as being actual, but which couldn’t be actual if the theory of evolution was right. This has little to do with any particular church or any religion. Religious explanations for the way the actual world functions were undermined because scientifically accepted explanations had turned things upside down.

All of these are the reason, I think, that for me church became less and less relevant. It seemed to be a belief in fairytales.

But not quite. Because for me the example of Jesus and his preaching is still very strong. His loving, compassionate way of relating to people seems to me to be just what he said it was, the way, the truth and the life. He seems to be both fully alive and also to accept all humans with loving acceptance and forgiveness. To live like Jesus, if your can somehow do it, is to be born again, regardless of the mythical stories about him including the virgin birth.

But then something else began to stir in me. And that was the awareness that the mythological seems to have been important to humans right from the time we were first human. And it seems to me that the mythological was never primarily about explaining the physical structure of the universe or a demand for obedience or a rule book of how to live, although religions often seemed to demand all three. Mythology has always been about connecting us to the internal life forces that impel us through life, about making us more intensely alive. And it turns out that science as it explains our physical makeup and the way the universe functions is often quite unsatisfying in guiding us to what makes us feel most alive and what impels us through life. Science is unsatisfying and mythology, stories about the passage of super humans and super gods and super animals, is much more satisfying. Mythology, for me, guides us to being fully alive, fully open to and responsive to the world within and around us.

So this brings me almost full circle. Mythology, in my case the stories about Jesus, is the way for me to be fully alive, to shed the forces that immobilize or suffocate me and to bring me to that feeling of being born again that is central to Christianity, including evangelical Christianity. But I can see that mythological stories about the gods did the same thing for the Greeks. And the presence of the pantheon of Hindu gods does the same thing for Hindus and the stories of Allah does the same thing for Moslems. Mythology guides us to being fully alive through stories. And it turns out that no set of mythological stories are the right ones with all the others being wrong, as so many religions and fundamental followers of religions believe. What is fundamental is not the particular stories, what is fundamental is the human inner drive or life force, those energizing inner visceral drives that Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud sensed and pointed to. The way of connecting with these inner drives is through stories which project this drive into the everyday world. And it turns out that we have made this inner connection with almost as many different religious storylines as there are human ways of connecting through language. There is no right language, and no right mythological stories, we seem to have found many ways to connect with the sacred which, when sensed with intensity, attracts story after story until there is a whole body of stories and ritual which enliven us. The major religions, and maybe our private ones, grow and grow by attracting story after story.

If this is true then we can quit arguing about which religious collection of stories and rituals is right. Different groups of people have found different ways, with some of the ways, such as the Greek gods, losing their power, and other ways gaining power but with none being right.

But what seems to me to be the case is that church or the synagogue or the Hindu temple or the mosque is the place where people can connect in the presence of others in worship which enhances the ways that these stories touch them.

So that is my resolution of the tension between mythology and science, at least for today.